Day 1

Today marks the beginning of my journey into life 2.0 after retirement. How did this happen? It was planned. The goal of this website is share my experiences after leaving the work place. I will cover topics such as ‘did I get this right’ and ‘omg am I really unemployed’ to ‘I’m going to build this…’ or ‘I can fix that’. I will also pinpoint decisions I made early on that ended up being critical to success as well as decisions that ended up being not so great.

My career began in 1990 when I applied for a job at Ameritrust working in a vault. My job was to retrieve and return student loan and mortgage documents. It was an easy job and after I mastered the manual nature of the job I decided to look for improvements. I quickly figured out the computer system and begin changing the code of the dbase III files. At first my changes were subtle as I didn’t want to get in trouble for making unauthorized changes. Eventually my supervisor and manager knew I was capable of fixing the systems and began to rely on me for that job. I even created an entire application to search and manage the mortgage documentation. After that I was invited to work with the Systems department. I was maybe 20 at the time and only recently had any formal education on computer science. I was a C64 enthusiast and that early exposure to computers changed the trajectory of my life.

From there I worked my way up to managing the daily computer operations and running a development team. We created small productivity applications until I received my first project…. The Check Room. That will be Tuesday’s topic.